Friday, December 21, 2007

One small step...

Well, last month we launched our new building - Armstrong Hall. Purdue is very proud of their alumni who have been astronauts (something like 25 astronauts) - so a bunch of them came in all their glory for our building opening. Of course, the person EVERYONE wanted to meet was Neil Armstrong. You might imagine that this would be difficult...secret service men managing the crowds, and then poor Neil who is kinda shy. Well, thanks to my years of "Disneyland" I got to put my well-honed skills of "cutting line" into action. A friend who is a huge fan of Neil really wanted to meet him and and so I took her hand and winded my way through the crowd (in all my Space Mountain line-cutting glory) and "lo and behold!" got to the center of the crowd. This is Chrissa with Neil (I'm the one taking the picture).

As it turns out - incredibly nice man. Very down to earth. When he gave his talk at the dinner that evening he said "I know what speech you all want to hear, but tonight I'm going to talk about something more important...Homecoming." It was Homecoming that weekend and one of the stories he told was how he chose not to go to MIT because they didn't have a football team - and then chose Purdue because they had a good one (as well as a good engineering program). The crowd hooted and hollared...gotta love someone who cares that much about football...